Sorry, but Ben Franklin was a better geek. Not only did he invent, he espoused a philosophy about life that he actively pursued himself. He was brilliant, but he also got out, partied, and lived life. Just about all the others on that list were either recluses or tortured genii. Me? I like Ben.

Not to mention his skills as a statesman, convincing France to support the 13 colonies in the American Revolution through all-night, wine-soaked, multi-course meals with French royalty/politicians. And the patent system which, far from its current incarnation, was originally intended to protect inventors from having their ideas stolen by rich asshats and without which there would be no Tesla or Edison. Plus, he had to have had balls of steel to experiment with lightening in an era where disease was still treated with leeches and accusations of witchcraft were taken seriously. Franklin was Mark Twain, Tony Stark, and John F. Kennedy rolled into one.

I agree Ben Franklin was a better geek. Heck look at his stance on patents. From his autobiography regarding his open stove...

Gov’r. Thomas was so pleas’d with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin’d it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.

You know, the person who had knowledge of the decimal place value system, deduced the value of pi (and maybe concluded it was irrational), algebra and determined the radius of the Earth among other things.

Remember, it was his ship 'The Great Eastern' that laid the first Transatlantic Cable.The design of the railway bridge of the thames at Maidenhead is also a marvel of engineering. Most of his peers said it would fall down. It is still in use today carrying 125mph trains.Then his father pioneered the Shield Method of tunnelling when building the first tunnel under the Thames.

For a high priest of Ra, the guy wrote a thoroughly secular first medicine manual ever. As in, unlike even later texts from the same area, this guy doesn't do healing with prayers, amulets, etc, and just deals with stuff like washing and bandaging a wound, or extracting medicine from plants.

Also came up with an irrigation system that fed a whole lot of people.

And with the first pyramid. Though that actually doesn't do justice to his contribution to architecture. When you look at the complex of buildings around it, the guy was a frikken genius for that time. E.g., to support some tremendously heavy ceiling blocks, he used the first columns we know of in Egypt AND he figured out anchoring them to the walls for extra strength.

And actually he wrote the first manual of architecture too, which was used by Egyptians a long time after his death.

And arguably, if the pyramids were an early welfare system, in which people could volunteer to pull some blocks for a huge monument in exchange for a wage, this guy pretty much invented welfare.

And all that was happening in 2600 BC. I mean, even Hero was working in the Greek culture which was pretty scientific, and he had some giants on whose shoulders to stand. Imhotep was doing his stuff back when anything even resembling a scientific method OR philosophy wouldn't be discovered for another 2000 years.

It's really a shame that most people probably only know him as the magic-wielding undead villain of The Mummy. The guy really didn't deserve that.

Didn't he invent two-way video communicators? Their intercontinental range was utterly impressive, but I venture to guess that the reason they didn't do so well in the market was because they only had one ringtone.

Inventor ofThe surface condenserThe hot air engineThe world's first monitor, USS Monitor, was both designed and built by Ericsson for the Union Navy in the American Civil WarTorpedo technology, especially Destroyer, an advanced torpedo boatThe solar machine, using concave mirrors to gather sun radiation strong enough to run an engine.USS Princeton (1843)Hoop gun constructionThe Propeller

Apart from the laws of motion and calculus and all that, he also invented the cat-flap door so he wouldn't have to manually let his cat in or out.

Ok, he probably wasn't the first to cut a hole in a door for cats, be he is apparently the first to be documented doing it. Funnily enough, when his cat had kittens, he cut a separate smaller hole for them, apparently not realizing that they could (and probably would) just follow the mother through her larger door.

The fact that not every single of his inventions actually worked doesn't mean he was not an inventor. Leonardo da Vinci was the archetype of the Homo Universalis. He did not believe in specialization, he believed anyone could do anything. He was as much a researcher as he was a painter, as much a writer as he was an inventor, as much a musician as he was an mathematician, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, cartographer or architect. When he chose to do one thing, it didn't mean he wouldn't do another. That's what I love about the guy and the reason I voted for him in the poll.

That's what I love about the guy and the reason I voted for him in the poll.

I can't disagree with your sentiment, I like Leonardo da Vinci, too. However, as for being an inventor, Tesla is much better than da Vinci. Still, it's an opinion poll, so your choice is a good one, too. Just as long as it's not Edison.:)

Leo was an painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer, a true renaissance man. He was the one of the fathers of modern science. I guess for you parachutes are scifi, right? He designed a workable parachute, even though it was used in his time, we have built other SciFi stuff that he invented, so fair everything worked.

James Watt and his sidekick, Matthew Boulton held back the Industrial Revolution for years due to their patents on the Steam Engine.His engines were very innefficient and anyone who tried to improve it was persued

Our modern world would not be possible without the genius of Nikola Tesla.Just take a look.AC power,radio,(Yes Marcorni finally got discredited) and many others.The truth of what Tesla did is just now coming out.

Abraham Darby for starting the industrial revolution.From WikipediaIn 1709, at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, England, Abraham Darby began to fuel a blast furnace with coke instead of charcoal.His new process made lots of cheap good quality cast iron, used for pots and pans, fire grates, and bridges! This lead to massive expansion of transport (lots of heavy iron to move), and could be said to have started "consumerism", with barges moving vast quantities of iron goods along the canals.

Don't get me wrong: I'm very impressed with Tesla's genius and quiet personality. But as a MythBusters episode pointed out (in which they tested Tesla's alleged earthquake machine), he was in trouble financially in his later years, and made all sorts of wild claims to try and win over investors - like the antiaircraft death ray. That, and several other crazy-sounding inventions made me cast some doubt over how many of his discoveries and inventions were actually real. Somehow, if all our modern technology i

Tesla suffers from a mythology created around him that has effectively made it near to impossible for the tourist to really know what he did and didn't do. He did have some really reaching ideas, but from his perspective he actually thought there was some merit and wanted to research them. Did he try to "market" his ideas to get funding? Absolutely. But then what scientific research would ever get off the ground if the researches didn't?

I'm casting my vote for Claude Shannon whose inventions included a unicycle with an off-center wheel for juggling purposes. Because it's insanely fun inventions like that that allow one to come up with modern information theory.

I voted Other, and by Other, I mean Charles Proteus Steinmetz. Steinmetz did more to advance the theory and practice of alternating current than Tesla ever imagined, even though he hasn't captured the imagination of the nerd herd like Tesla has, with all of the grandiose ideas he had for death rays and world destroying machines. Steinmetz was the real deal. His research and development into lightning, including the design of the first ever man-made lightning machine, earned him the nickname "forger or thunderbolts". WIthout Steimnetz's development of the theory of alternating current, widespread distribution of electric power would not have been possible...that's more of a contribution than Tesla made....

Also worth mentioning are guys like Ferraris (3-phase), Ferranti (transformers) and Dolivo-Dobrovsky (first complete AC demo system). In practical terms there's also Decker (who built a commercial AC system in Calfiornia before Tesla/Westinghouse's Niagara facility) and WenstrÃm (who built one in Sweden before Niagara and founded ASEA, now ABB - the world's biggest manufacturer of power-transmission systems).

It's rather ironic that there's this cult of Tesla that's arisen around the myth that he's an u

He's basically the patron saint of the modern open source and collaboration movement. He refused to patent, writing in his autobiography, "... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

Franklin is THE Slashdot hero! His inventions spanned many different areas and he was a politician, not to mention one with great ideas and his goal truly was the betterment of mankind. He was willing to prove it.

Unlike most of the others on the list he also wasn't crippled with personality disorders. Quite the opposite. He strived to be happy, healthy, and a valuable companion and friend. He had a hugely positive impact on the world in a number of disciplines, and was recognized for his greatness in his own time.

Of everyone on the list, Franklin is the one I'd most like to live my life like.

The more I read about Franklin, the more I like about him. There's a lot that went on even in his personal life, like his relationship with his son who was loyal to the British Crown that he attempted to stay on good terms with despite the fact etc... etc... etc... that cause me to respect the man more.

Franklin was a model human being the rest of us should attempt to emulate.

He was a smart guy that invented many things. He may not have directly invented a lot of the things that came out of his lab, but he made a place available for others to do so.
He was a big fan of the telegraph too - made a machine to slow it down when he was young, and nicknamed his children "dash" and "dot", so maybe he has all the morse code lovers.

There is a big difference between being the real inventor and filing the patent for the invention. Edison, is more like Steve Jobs....find something techy, convince people they need it, make some minor improvements to crap that was already out there, and then simultaneously smear your competition and make "exclusivity" agreements to make it so people can't change once they've locked into your crap.

About the only difference is Edison publicly electrocuted puppies as a PR stunt, I think Jobs probably just did it in private for his own shits-n-giggles.

You do realize that Bill Gates stole all his inventions from the late Steve Jobs, right? Same as all inventions claimed by Google, Sun, Oracle and Xerox: all can ultimately be traced back to Jobs. Look at all court cases and press of the last 30 years, that should clearly prove my point.